Britain's biggest paper quietly covers the breasts

LONDON -- Newspapers are usually about the great issues of our time; war and peace, disease and politics.

But not The Sun, Britain's most widely circulated paper. Right now, CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips reports its biggest story is about what it no longer prints on page three. Parental discretion is advised.

Editors note, Jan. 22, 2015: The Sun brought back the "Page 3" topless feature after just a day, with a jab at its competitors for all the speculation.

Proudly calling itself "The People's Paper," The Sun sells more than 2 million copies every day with its mix of sports, celebrity gossip, maybe a little news and, what has come to be known as the Page 3 Girl.

For years, readers had only to turn over the cover page to get a daily eyeful of, "Lacey, 22, from Bedford," or perhaps "Courtnie, 23, from Plymouth." Whomever she was on the given day, the young woman always appeared smiling -- and topless.

Just a bit of circulation-enhancing fun, a harmless tradition, the paper has argued.

Or, according to critics like Yas Necati, misplaced, malicious, misogynistic sexism.

"The Page 3 image is often the biggest image of a woman in the newspaper," said Necati. "There's usually page after page of men fully clothed doing things, and running the country, achieving in sports, you know, it's all about what they're doing, and with women it's about what they look like."

But flip open the paper to page three on Wednesday and you get chicken breasts, instead of the other kind; a supermarket ad.

At a London working-man's cafe on Wednesday morning, it was the end of the world as we know it.

"I think it's a woman's right if she wants to get her boobs out," said one breakfaster.

"Why change it now, know what I mean?" questioned another.

It's a question the paper's owner -- international press baron Rupert Murdoch -- has been asking, too. So he's hedging his bets. Topless women still adorn the paper's website.

The Internet is full of that anyway, and more, notes British columnist Quentin Letts.

"Far worse things are happening on the Internet, that really the Sun's page there was a wonderfully old fashioned sort of sexism, and I don't think really that many people were offended by it," said Letts.

Not even, apparently, the women who posed.

"It's not objectifying women," argued Page 3 Girl Tracey, 22, from Essex. "I think it's, like, making them look more appealing, more girl power."

The Sun hasn't officially announced it's dropping the Page 3 girls forever... Perhaps they're waiting to see what happens to their circulation numbers.